Re: GPS implants are here... NOT...

From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 01:36:21 MST


> > The Aetherwire folks are working on ultrawideband pulse gizmos to do
> local
>
>Digital pulse radio, ja? (I've become somewhat wary of time-domain &
>consorts, since they so far don't deliver on their pretty grand claims)
>
>Aetherwire? URL?

Just try typing aetherwire into your browser. :) www.aetherwire.com.

Aether Wire & Location is a competitor of Time Domain. I wouldn't call them
consorts.
We'll have to wait & see who can deliver the goods. I think Aetherwire has
stayed pretty conservative in their claims. Nobody's *there* yet, at least
in the open literature/industry.

> > positioning to centimeter accuracy at kilometer range, but not using
> cells.
>
>Not using cells? How so? Launching new infrastructure into space? Even
>if you don't pack Rb/Cs clocks into them and make them suitcase-sized
>sats, that is going to be expensive. Of course one can combine that
>with Teledesic etc., but I doubt anybody thinks as far ahead.

There seems to be some confusion here. I said "at kilometer range". Given
Earth atmosphere, putting a space infrastructure up in orbit at an altitude
of a few kilometers seems rather labor intensive, not to mention the
stratospheric particle load all that ablation would likely create. :)

If you know Time Domain, you know the idea. A gaggle of devices
cross-locate each other. When I said "no cells", I meant specifically no
cellphone cells. I thought saying so would be redundant, given context.

> > One could easily imagine a cell-to-aetherwire relay/reporter/gateway with
> > differential GPS self location that might not require any cooperation
> from
> > the cell provider.
>
>Once we have realtime cm resolution everywhere, autonomous robots are
>going to get quite frisky. Beats machine vision/map construction every
>time....

I'm afraid I'm old-fashioned: I'd want sensor fusion, multimode stuff like
machine vision alongside raw positioning. This frisky stuff still has to
exist alongside dumb matter for a while yet.



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